"He can say he's Jackson and order an attack in force on the ship."
"I don't follow you."
"Skidding the ship in a circle with the exhaust blowers on," Drummond explained patiently, "will take care of ten thousand clunkers."
He dropped from the ledge and raced into the cave. None of the robots stirred. Either they hadn't noticed Drummond's departure, Angus reasoned, or they weren't concerned because they knew the cave led nowhere.
The sun came up, daubing the cliff with splotches of orange and purple and striking up scintillations in the beads of dew on the robots' backs.
And still the tiresomely shouted veneration continued.
Angus paced the ledge, stopping occasionally to stare into the impenetrable shadows of the cave. He checked his watch. Five hours to go—five hours, and then time would be meaningless for the rest of his life, with the ship destroyed.
It was unlikely that rescue would come. The wrecked spacer's automatic distress signals had gone out in an ever-expanding sphere for a hundred years, and he and Drummond had been the only humans to hear them.
Trade routes were pretty stable in this section of the Galaxy now. And it was hardly possible that, within the next ten or twenty years, one would be opened up that would intercept the SOS that had lured them here.